We had a civil war?

Britain is the world's oldest surviving, unbroken democracy (Greece has only been a democracy again since 1974 and the British had 12 elected Prime Minister before the US came into being) and the British parliament is often described as the "Mother of Parliaments."

Not so long ago, you could say that Britain was possibly the most democratic country in the world and the safest country in which to go to bed at night.

Could you say that now after almost 12 years of Labour rule?

Following the affair over the arrest of Tory MP Damien Green, the Speaker of the House of Commons has been in hot water over his failure to protect the Commons.

Even the English Civil War, which beheaded King Charles I and got rid of the Absolute Monarchy almost 150 years BEFORE the French beheaded Louis XVI and got rid of their Absolute Monarchy (which many people forget), has a strangely low profile amongst the British people.

Maybe the British just don't know how lucky they are....

Bagehot

The unfinished revolution

Dec 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Explaining Britain’s—and Parliament’s—ambivalent approach to liberty

Illustration by Steve O'Brien

SPEAKER Lenthall has not enjoyed such publicity for 350 years. Commentators have deployed assorted historical analogies for the arrest of Damian Green, the Conservative immigration spokesman, and the search of his parliamentary office by police: Stalinism, Zimbabwe, the Stasi, Watergate—and, as a contrast, the momentary heroism of William Lenthall. His newly recollected act of defiance is comparatively apt: in 1642 Lenthall refused Charles I’s request that he identify five uppity MPs, whom the king had come to the House of Commons to arrest. War soon broke out between Charles and Parliament.

William Lenthall was the Speaker of the House of Commons in 1642 when he refused King Charles I's request to arrest five MPs. Since that time, no monarch has dared to step foot inside the Commons. The current Speaker, Michael Martin, doesnt appear to be as willing to defend the Commons

Speaker who? Lenthall has a cameo role in “The Devil’s Who re”, a 17th-century drama series that, by coincidence, is currently airing on British television. But before his recent name-checks, he was scarcely a figure of national repute as, say, Paul Revere is in America. And beyond the timely body- and bodice-ripping of “The Devil’s Who re”, and outside a dedicated band of battle re-enactors, the English civil war itself has an oddly low profile these days. It led to the beheading of a king and a brief republic, but it didn’t produce a slogan, as the French revolution did, or a public holiday, or many monuments, other than the rueful statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminster.

The civil war is not really part of Britain’s modern brand. Bagehot contends that this obscurity matters. It reflects and may partly explain Britons’ ambivalent view of their rights and liberties. Those rights are cherished, yet dismissed; defended by a dedicated crew of lawyers and the odd politician, but worn carelessly by most and regularly assailed by blundering governments. Britain is a country that seems, often and worryingly, not to know how lucky it is, or how its good fortune came about.

Channel 4's lavish new costume drama about the English Civil War: The Devil's Who re

Consider the mixed reaction to Mr Green’s arrest. Perhaps some evidence will emerge that his relationship with a mole in the Home Office, who leaked embarrassing material about departmental incompetence, jeopardised national security, or that the liaison was criminally corrupt. If not, the treatment of Mr Green was an outrage: perhaps not one that renders Britain a Stalinist “police state”, but certainly one that undermines the long-standing if uncodified privileges of MPs. Nor is it the only recent case of worryingly heavy-handed behaviour by the police. Yet while some MPs on all sides have fulminated, others are silent or equivocal. Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, have been staggeringly dismissive of their colleagues’ anxieties.

It was Ms Smith, of course, who championed the government’s most recent efforts, via anti-terrorist legislation, to erode habeas corpus: the freedom from arbitrary detention that predates the civil war but was bolstered by it. Her attempt to extend the time suspected terrorists may be held without charge was opposed with admirable ferocity by some historically minded MPs and campaigners; but polls suggest that most ordinary Britons were unfussed, as they have been by other accretions of state power. A (narrow) majority of MPs backed the government (though the House of Lords later threw the plan out).

Behind both these episodes lies a species of insidious tyranny unknown to the 17th century. At the state opening of Parliament on December 3rd, the doors of the House of Commons were slammed in the face of Black Rod—an official who summons MPs to hear the Queen’s Speech—to symbolise the Commons’ independence, a principle the civil war was fought to affirm. But since the evolution of modern political parties, the threat to Parliament’s primacy has come instead from over-mighty governments, able to manipulate MPs through whips and patronage. The row over Mr Green, which swiftly degenerated into a party wrangle, illustrates how far party loyalty has usurped some MPs’ allegiance to Parliament itself. Thus the House of Lords sometimes appears the more reliable guardian of the civil war’s legacy (ironically, since the revolutionaries temporarily abolished it).

Ah, the House of Lords. For much of the time since it was restored (with the monarchy) in 1660, democrats have wanted to remake it. The New Labour government inherited that reforming impetus and acted on it—sort of. The upper house still, somewhat incredibly, contains 92 hereditary peers, alongside the mass of appointed ones. It is a fudge characteristic of a country with an instinct for democratic progress, but a countervailing laziness—and only a dim recollection of its radical past.

Memory and forgetting

The civil war was not always so neglected. It was a hot topic for Whig historians of the 19th century and for Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps, in a mostly post-radical age, the struggle no longer echoes. Or perhaps the story simply seems too complicated for modern attention spans. It was messy, and not just in terms of gore. It lacks heroes: as “1066 and All That”, a comic guide to English history, summarises, the Roundheads were “right but repulsive”. They banned Christmas and succumbed to militarism and murder. The revolution was halting, sometimes inadvertent and superficially undone by the Restoration. Moreover, it was a parliamentary rather than popular revolt, and so transformed ordinary lives less than some other upheavals: it did not bequeath a general sense of civic pride and participation, as did the American and French revolutions that it helped to inspire. Britain still suffers from that shortcoming.

All the same, with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Bill of Rights of 1689 and the Act of Settlement of 1701, the civil war transformed the country. It deserves more space and celebration in the history curriculum, and on plinths and television.

Britons might value their liberties more highly if they understood they were won in bloody struggle, not enjoyed through mere serendipity.

And there ought, perhaps, to be an urgent, remedial history course for some senior policemen—plus lessons on Speaker Lenthall and his peers for some MPs and ministers.